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peace

For most people, autumn signifies the beginning of the end, the harbinger of winter, the last hurrah before the year ends and begins anew, the year itself being a phoenix that, at least where I’m from, rises not from ashes but from a fresh ivory powder, cold and wet and long. For most people, autumn is the bed news bear they women up to after a long night of drinking and having fun with summer.

For most people, their year ends on December 31st and begins on January 1st. Not for me, though. Those are just days.

My year begins and ends in Spring, May 10th, the day I was brought into this world covered in blood and greeted by a string of pained profanities. I calculate my years by a full 365 days on earth to accomplish (or fail) in whatever tasks I’ve set ahead of myself. It doesn’t seem fair to me to give up 129 days just because I wasn’t around to see them (if you’re wondering, I didn’t accomplish a lot that first year I was around. Walking, maybe. A couple lazy words, perhaps. My second year was far more productive: I ruined an entire marriage).

So my year starts when the flowers begin to boom, under the handful of showers slinking away from April, somewhere behind the dirty caked patches of snow struggling to survive on the sides of the road. Spring is messy, as is birth, and beautiful, and full of life, but fledgling. Summer is full of sunshine and brightness and long days (good long, not hours of being screamed at by customers long). And then autumn.

For many, the fall season is full of melancholy. Resignation. Hell, there are even those who love winter and so want to skip through autumn as quickly as possible to get to the skiing and snowboarding and snowmachining.

Me, I like the colors. Alaska in fall is gorgeous, especially out in the wilderness and on the hiking trails. I don’t get out there much. I grew up watching films set in places like Seattle and New York and Paris: bigger cities with long stretches of neighborhood with trees that towered over the streets, awash in shades and hues once August hits, a song by sight through October.

I’ve never been to New York City. I’ve only driven through it in places like Kentucky and Tennessee and, yes, Seattle. But the first time I got to walk through a long stretch like that, like I had seen in the movies, I was 18 years old. It was a park somewhere in London. Steve Irwin had just been killed by one of the last animals anyone would have guessed, and though I was never much an avid watcher of his show, he was well known enough that it was jarring news to wake up to. So I was there, young, the furthest from home I had ever been, with only one person with me that I knew, contemplating mortality while the trees all died around me.

It was sad, and it was beautiful.

I go for long walks often, and when it isn’t autumn here, I pull that memory of London from the tail end of September and set it right behind my eyes. I walk a lot, I think a lot, and as the year begins to slip into a long, dark difficult period (but not the end! Not the end of my year), I reflect on what I’ve done since my birthday. Where I stand with the goals I had set for myself that year. What I plan to do or change to reach them once snow begins to fall and I have to dig my heels in.

This year, it’s a weird one. I hit my three year mark in a job I enjoy sometimes but don’t want to turn into a career. I’m still living in a place that doesn’t seem to satisfy me on an emotional or mental level, a place that doesn’t seem to offer me many opportunities to grow as a person and as an artist. I’m sitting on a novel that should have taken me three months to write and is now a nearly ten month endeavor, because… why? I don’t want to close the door on a chapter of my life that was always supposed to be fleeting? Because I wanted to believe a certain kind of love could work out and I’m using art to work through why it can’t?

These are things that often trouble me and, I suspect, will trouble me deeply this winter, as it troubles me every winter, but for some reason always seem to get compartmentalized in the fall.

Autumn is my favorite season. My season. When death is beautiful and everywhere, and presents itself as a farewell with a gentle promise to see you again soon. It’s an opening number to winter’s main event, a deep and broad beauty in its own way, stark and simple and clean. It’s the season I think. The season I am the closest I can be to peace. The season I reevaluate and walk down long paths, even if sometimes only in my mind, even if sometimes a decade ago on another continent.

I would very much like to die some day, far down the line, perhaps the end of August, perhaps the beginning of September, surrounded by reds and yellows, the odd greens, the warm browns, head tilted back against a shedding trunk, a good book open in my lap.

After all, autumn is a season of death, and beauty, a companion to walk you into darkness to new life beyond. That seems peaceful to me. That seems perfect to me.